Ida Haendel, Violin Virtuoso With ‘Fire and Ice’ in Her Playing, Dies
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Ida Haendel, the Polish-born prodigy with a fiery sound and unassailable technique who became one of the foremost violinists of her generation, died on July 1 in Pembroke Park, Fla.
Her nephew Richard Grunberg, who confirmed the death, in a nursing home, said she had had kidney cancer.
Ms. Haendel’s age was a matter of debate. According to her British passport, she was 91; her nephew said she was 96. He said she had a birth certificate that her father had produced in London to prove that she was 14 at the time — older than she actually was — to circumvent a minimum-age rule for performers in paid concerts. Promotional materials on other occasions gave different ages to make her appear younger.
A student of the noted pedagogue Carl Flesch and the composer, pianist and violinist George Enescu, Ms. Haendel (pronounced HAN-del) was a living link to an early-20th-century school of violin playing centered on simmering sound and dramatic phrasing. In lyrical passages, her ardent vibrato and swooping portamento lent her playing a strong vocal character, while her articulation in virtuosic passagework could be crisp to the point of percussive.
An example is her 1955 recording of the Brahms concerto with Sergiu Celibidache, a conductor with whom she had a close and sometimes tumultuous working relationship. Her signature piece was the Sibelius Violin Concerto, which she played with a contained urgency that the critic Geoffrey Norris once described in The Telegraph of London as “fire and ice” and “mind-blowing.” After a 1949 performance in Helsinki, Sibelius wrote her a letter and congratulated himself “for having found a performer of your standard.”
Until the 1980s, Ms. Haendel was virtually the only woman among the top tier of concert violinists. In later decades she complained about being sidelined by younger players in a market that prized attractive new faces. But well into her 80s she embraced any opportunity to play. In a 2004 documentary by the Dutch director Paul Cohen, she declared matter-of-factly, “I am the violin.”
The cellist Steven Isserlis, who played Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with Ms. Haendel and the pianist Martha Argerich, said Ms. Haendel’s music making had always conveyed passion. “It was strong, vibrant, focused and came from right deep inside her,” he said in a phone interview. “She really was the violin — there was no separation.”
Ida Hendel was born in Chelm, in eastern Poland, on Dec. 15, probably in either 1923 or 1928, to Nathan and Faigie (Goldgevicht) Hendel. Her father was a portrait painter. (Ida later added an “a” to her last name in homage to the Baroque composer.) According to her autobiography, “Woman with Violin” (1970), she was 3½ when she picked up her older sister’s violin and reproduced a melody she had heard her mother sing.
Her father rented an apartment in Warsaw so that she could take lessons there, and in 1935 she won the Warsaw Conservatory’s gold medal for virtuosity. She never attended school.
Ms. Haendel moved to Paris on the invitation of the great Hungarian virtuoso Joseph Szigeti, who had offered to teach her but was frequently away on tour. Instead, she began to study with Flesch, whom she later followed to London, as well as Enescu.
While living in London, Ms. Haendel gave her first Proms concert in 1937 at the Queens Hall, playing the Beethoven concerto under the direction of Henry Wood. Her family was Jewish, and her father, who was in London with her and sensed that war with Nazi Germany was imminent, arranged for Ida’s mother and sister to join them in Britain. They became British citizens.
During the war, Ms. Haendel performed for British and American troops and was featured in the morale-boosting concerts at the National Gallery put on by the pianist Myra Hess.
Ms. Haendel ntered into a fruitful artistic collaboration with the conductor Rafael Kubelik, with whom she recorded Bruch’s first violin concerto in 1948 and Beethoven’s in 1951. She also worked with the conductors Thomas Beecham, Charles Munch, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Simon Rattle, among others.
Her advocacy for the concertos written by Britten and Walton helped bring them into the mainstream. She also performed the premiere of Allan Pettersson’s second violin concerto in 1980 and was the dedicatee of Luigi Dallapiccola’s “Tartiniana Seconda” in 1957. She was one of the first Western soloists to be invited to perform in China, part of a 1973 tour with the London Philharmonic.
Ms. Haendel moved to Montreal in 1952 and several decades later settled in Miami Beach. She lived in a house that she had bought for her father so that he could be near the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, a close friend.
She never married. She spoke of feeling unattractive and invisible to men. “Not only my father thought of me as an instrument only,” she said in one interview.
In an interview for “The Haendel Variations,” a documentary released in 2018, Ms. Haendel, when asked whether she had sacrificed her private life for music, replied, “Nobody ever told me, ‘Put down the violin, let’s get married, you will be my wife and that’s that.’”
No immediate family members survive.
In her later years, Ms. Haendel, whose wardrobe was dominated by flouncy sleeves and Fauvist colors, doted on a succession of dogs that were all named Decca, after her longtime record company. She took several to the taxidermist and put at least one on display in her Miami Beach home.
Asked in the 2004 documentary what it had been like to be a child prodigy, she said, “I was old,” adding, “I’m more of a child now.”
Mr. Isserlis recalled an impromptu performance that Ms. Haendel gave around 1 a.m. in a late-night diner in Westchester County that he described as filled with bikers. The conversation had turned to Schumann’s Violin Sonata in D minor, and Mr. Isserlis offered that he didn’t know the piece well. “Do you want to know how it goes?” she asked.
“Before I could stop her she took out her violin and played Schumann, with all the bikers watching,” Mr. Isserlis said. “When she was done everyone erupted in applause.”
Ms. Haendel traveled in 2006 to Auschwitz, where she played the Prayer from the “Dettingen Te Deum” by Handel for a delegation that included Pope Benedict XVI. Her recorded performance of the simple melody is impassioned, her tone anguished yet irrepressibly vibrant.
Mark Samberg, a cousin who grew close to her in later years, said in a phone interview that Ms. Haendel had once told him, “It is the emotional content of the sound that moves the spirit.”
He said she often returned to a memory from early childhood. “When she was a little girl practicing, her father would be listening in the other room, and he would say, ‘I hear what you’re playing, but what does it mean?’ That question stayed with her, her entire life.”
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